You Were A Witch With Your Short Hair
by Knackard
Summary: Jacob Black has lots of tingly new feelings for his best friend and vampire-slaying cohort, Nessie. Will Jake wither up and die of sexual frustration? This is Chapter 18 of The Slow Burn told from Jacob's POV. Prior knowledge of TSB fun but not necessary. Two-part short story.
1. In Which Nessie Isn't Wearing A Bra

**Hey all. This is chapter 18 (Pissy Exhausted Werewolf Asshole) of The Slow Burn, written from Jacob's point of view. If you need to reread that chapter, it's easy to find through my profile page, but even if you've never read TSB this works as a stand-alone vignette. The title is taken from "Witch," by Maps and Atlases (not at all the sort of music Jacob would listen to, but I kept hearing it while working on this story and it does seem to fit).  
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**Before you read the story, I'd like to quote Dan Bergstein, whose views on movie Jacob exactly mirror my own.**

**_"__The Jacob in my head does not look like a cashier at Forever21. In my head, he looks like a Native American Han Solo, with rugged good looks, a world-weary face, abs that make you whisper, "Yes," to an empty room, and powerful legs so long that they go all the way to the…I'm straight. Totally straight. You know what I like? Hot chicks with boobs and butts and bikinis. Boobs are completely what I'm interested in. And estrogen."_**

**That is the Jacob in my head, too. He has a prominent nose that's been broken one too many times, and his feet are really gross and coarse, and his hands are basically _never_ free of motor oil/dirt/blood, and he has one crooked tooth that shows every time he smiles. In other words, he's a person. Enjoy.**

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"God dammit stupid bitch ass…" I muttered a steady stream of abuse at the ridiculous piece of flawed machinery in my garage. This '06 Ford Mustang had practically fallen into my hands, and it was such a shitty car that I felt pity for it instead of harvesting scraps off of it like I should have. What a lemon. It and me.

"_Balls! _Fuck you, you shitty, useless—" I heard a familiar whistle outside the garage and the sound of my front door latching. My rage at the car took an abrupt nosedive. I could be mad at this piece of shit tomorrow. I was tired and sweaty and dirty and my favorite human being on the planet was waiting for me in the house.

I wiped my hands on a rag, which spread the filth around but didn't actually clean them, and went in. Nessie was lying on her stomach on the floor of my living room, feet in the air and crossed at the ankles, giggling at _Wallace and Gromit_. Her scent hit me as soon as I came in the door. Sweet and dark. A sugar maple in a forest fire.

Damn. Every time I thought I was used to the way she smelled, it grabbed me by the nuts and squeezed.

"Hey, Ness," I said, a little too loudly. "Been drinking? Lemme get a clean glass and I'll catch up."

I hurried through to the kitchen and started scrubbing my hands with the gritty soap. The grease wasn't really coming off, but at least it wasn't smearing around anymore. That was good. I didn't want to track dirty black junk all over her when I hugged her and played with her hair and...

Shit. This was exactly the sort of thinking I was trying to avoid. Ever since she'd left that dickweed teacher and come back to live in Forks, a fundamental part of our relationship had been replaced by something more complicated and a hell of a lot more frustrating. At least, on my side it had: I couldn't look at her anymore without dwelling on all those curves I wanted to see closer, the little pad of flesh that covered her lower abdomen, the place where her thighs just touched each other, the…

Stop! Stop stop _stop_. I had never had any trouble with my love for Nessie. It had always been the most satisfying and the simplest part of my life. Family, but easier. When the imprint took twenty-six years ago, Nessie didn't become a stand-in for her mother, but she did put her in perspective. Bella was stripped of that haze of romantic desirability, and she did not hold up well to impartial scrutiny: after Nessie was born, Bella was revealed to me as rather more whiny, needy, and ungracious than I'd previously realized. I fell in love with other women. I came real close to proposing to Maya, probably would have if she hadn't taken that job in Boston.

I never saw Nessie that way. On our visits to each other, all the casual easy rough-housing was how we stayed close. It was amazingly similar to the way I interacted with my pack. It was as natural as running for us. I didn't really like Jonathan or any of his successors, but not because I saw them as threats. They just all seemed too earthbound and stuffy for a girl like her. She assured me her boyfriends were much cooler when I wasn't around, but I had to take her word on that because every time I saw them they were wound up tight as a jack-in-the-box. The last one had shown promise. Sam, his name was. And Sam broke her heart, the little shit.

Out of the blue one day I'd felt that imprint-y tug that made me pull out my phone and call her, and she was asking me to meet her at her house, and somehow that was the last time things were normal. She raced out to meet me in her front yard before I even put the Rabbit in park.

We went right to each other as always for a hug, and I felt little shudders running through her body that quickly turned into absolute wrenching sobs. She cried and cried and cried, drenching the shoulder of my shirt, and then cried some more. She didn't look up until she was done and hiccups were all that were left. Her cheeks were blotchy red, her nose was pink, her eyes were red-rimmed, and little flakes of black were peppered down her face, the only fragments of makeup that had survived the flood.

For some reason, seeing her like that flipped a switch in my brain. This was not the girl I had always known. This was a woman who had just had her heart broken, and the total destructive sadness that was broadcast all over her face and body was beautiful to me in a way I'd never experienced before. At that moment Leah's words to me years ago made sense.

"_So you're not into her," _she'd stated.

"_I love her more than anything, but not, you know…"_

"_Not the way everyone expects you to."_

"_Yeah. Hey, I like it this way. I'm done trying to figure out what evolutionary purpose imprinting serves. All I know is that little girl is the most important thing on earth, and anyone who tries to hurt her will end up as wolf pellets in the forest."_

"_Well then, I guess you're two kinds of mythical creature, aren't you?"_

"_How's that?"_

"_Not only are you a werewolf, you're also the only straight male who's ever seen that chick and not wanted to put his dick in her. Good for you, Jacob."_She'd rolled her eyes then, and the subject was dropped.

And now I was taking three cold showers a day, ordering my wolves around with unnecessary force, trying to shove her back into the comfortable asexual box in which she'd lived for twenty-five years. Mostly I was successful. Sometimes I wasn't, and I jerked off furtively in the shower to mental pictures of her, and felt like a lecherous freak for days afterward.

I couldn't tell what it was that made it feel so taboo. Our difference in age was much less pronounced now than it had been when she first hit adulthood. Twenty-five year olds hooked up with forty-two year olds and it wasn't even worth commenting on, and the fact was that she'd been an adult almost as long as I had. I still had the body and voice and hormones of a guy in his mid-twenties, and I still did stupid shit that I was supposed to have outgrown by now, and I still voted Democratic. Those forty-two years hadn't turned me into my dad, probably because half of them were spent as a wolf. Sure, I paid taxes and bills and helped the younger wolves with college tuition, and I got snippy when they made fun of music I listened to when I was their age, but I didn't feel middle-aged and I sure as hell didn't act it. And the longer we both lived, the less our relative ages would matter anyway.

But she had been a non-sexual being in my eyes for so long that I could barely bring myself to face it now. It felt subversive and unfamiliar.

Besides, she wasn't hurting for boyfriends. The last thing I wanted was to destroy our easy joyful friendship on a gamble. Just because the switch had been flipped in my brain didn't mean it had been flipped in hers. She clearly still saw me as she'd always seen me: dependable, fun, dickless.

Drag.

It occurred to me that she was saying something.

"…Doesn't have to," she chirped, "Because he's English, see?"

"Clear as kidney stones," I said. She popped up in the doorway to the kitchen and I steeled myself to face her, to talk about something normal and non-lecherous. "I hate that stupid car—" I started to say.

"Oh, fie, young one!" she said, cutting me off. "All you need is a hug!" She was so adorable when she'd had booze. She never seemed to make it past the bubbly, humorous stage. She was way funnier than me when we drank, although I was admittedly biased: I thought she was way funnier than everyone, always.

I held out my arms and regretted it almost instantly as she bounded into them, because from the outline of her breasts under that green shirt there was no way that girl was wearing a bra. She pressed against me and I fervently wished I had on fourteen layers, anything to keep me from feeling so vividly the contours of her chest, those teardrop-shaped tits with silky nipples sliding around under her sweater. I swallowed hard and thanked all the gods that it wasn't cold in here, because if her nipples had been _en garde_ I would have had to run screaming into the night.

I took a deep breath, which wasn't helpful because it smelled like her and that did very bad things to my anatomy. She hadn't smelled this way when she was younger. Part of it was that she simply smelled adult now, but also she smelled more human as she got older. The traces of sweet leech-ness that hadn't bothered me _much _five years ago were now totally gone.

I broke the hug and grabbed a cup from the sink, gripping it like a life-raft. The cold impersonal chime of glass steadied me a little. Ness gave a sigh and turned toward the table. In passing her hand grazed my lower belly and all the blood in my body made a beeline for that area and parts south, and I squeezed too hard on the glass in my hand and felt it crackle like cellophane.

"God _dammit_!" I shouted, dropping the glass on the floor and turning to the sink. "Fucking shit ass hell crap!" I turned the faucet on as cold as it would go and held my gashed-open hand under the stream. The pain and cold water helped restore the balance of fluids in my body. Or in other words, my raging boner went down. I wrapped up the hand and turned to apologize to Ness, but she wasn't there. "Hey, where'd you go?"

She crawled out from beneath my kitchen table with eyes wide and lips slightly parted. "Under here," she said, cleaning lint off her pants. I wasn't going to be able to do this tonight. Usually I could, but not right now. Just seeing her run her hands down her tight-panted legs to brush away dust and hair—no, fur, _my _fur—was too much for me.

"Sorry," I said. "I've had a long day. I think I have to call it a night." Her face fell, and before I could do something stupid, like give her another hug, I headed toward my room.

"Jake, wait!" I felt her hand on my back and stopped moving. Why, oh _why _hadn't I worn a shirt? Oh, right, because shirts were stupid. But a nice parka would be good about now, at least I wouldn't have to feel her warm, soft fingers cupping my shoulder blade…I started to think about what else I'd like her to do to me with those fingers and shivered a little. The hand dropped. "Okay…well, good night, Jake. Love you." I couldn't bring myself to turn and look at her. She would look sad and pretty and that mouth and those eyes…

_Do the right thing, you asshole. Do the right thing_. "G'night, Ness. Love you back." I went into my room and closed the door, and then leaned heavily against it for a while. After I heard the front door close I lay down on my bed and whipped out my dick, feeling like a hound and hoping against hope that the next time I saw her, she would be wearing a goddamn bra.

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**Like it? Hate it? Bored? Want a cookie/biscuit? Can't remember what the hell I'm talking about? Let me know!**


	2. In Which Lichens Don't Help

The shame from that night carried me through a whole three weeks without mishap. Ness didn't notice anything amiss, or if she did she didn't show it. But I had to make a habit of running serious laps around the rez every time I knew I was going to see her, in an effort to tire myself out. Human form and everything. I didn't even think of trying to see her less. I knew it wouldn't work, the imprint—or my own lust, more likely—made it hard to be apart and more explosive when we saw each other after an absence.

Then, one evening in early fall, Ness had a cookout for my pack. I helped her catch and skin a deer and buy enormous quantities of ground beef, and I manned the huge dugout fire pit so she could eat first.

Seth caught my attention while I was scraping the last of the venison off the bone.

"Poor Dale. He hasn't fought her yet, has he?"

I looked where Seth was looking and saw Dale in a headlock, tucked under Nessie's arm while she shouted gleefully, "Say Uncle! Say Uncle!"

"Who says 'Uncle' anymore?" said Seth, shaking his head and laughing.

"Well, Nessie's an old-fashioned girl. Hell, with her dad I'm surprised she even made it out of the twentieth century."

"Jake!" The old-fashioned girl in question shouted my name around the gigantic bite of bratwurst that was currently submitting to her formidable molars. "Let's go to the beach, I want to toast marshmallows! You done with the meat?"

"A'right, let's go!" I corralled the wolves in the direction of the beach. Everyone wolfed up so we would get there faster while Nessie ran alongside us carrying Claire on her back, with a bag of matches and sugary junk food.

Dude, you just got owned. Robbie, who had fared better than most in his first tousle with Nessie, was twitting Dale about going down so easily.

Well, I wasn't supposed to phase, was I? Anyway, I don't like to hit girls, Dale responded with what probably sounded to him like dignity.

Bullshit! This from Kyle. Anyway, you probably couldn't beat her as a wolf, either. She's fast and she's got opposable thumbs.

This went on the entire way to the beach. I glanced over at Nessie. She had no idea what everyone was saying, but she looked happy. My wolves liked her. She didn't get in the way on a hunt. I knew from Leah that it was the same in the other pack. She could fit into any situation. She even got along with the prickish Cullens. I forgot half the time that she was related to them.

We all phased before we hit the treeline so we could step back into our shorts under cover. Nessie and Claire dragged great bleached branches of driftwood into a pile and lit it up, and everyone sat around laughing and drinking. Nessie brought me the first marshmallow.

"Thank you for doing the meat. I brought you a present." She held up the stick with the still-glowing marshmallow speared on the end.

"Ness, you know I hate marshmallows. They're like eating Willy Wonka's balls."

"Great!" she said impishly, and popped the whole thing in her mouth. "I wan'ed 'is one." She looked so damn cute with strings of melted marshmallow dangling out of her mouth. She smiled wide and squeezed the sticky burnt stuff between her teeth. "Marshmallows are what clouds are made of," she said thickly. "You have no soul."

Hours later, the sun was well down and the fire had burnt to a more manageable size. Seth started humming some song and without thinking I picked up the refrain. It was one of the more saccharine songs of the seventies; Seth occasionally shouted the lyrics at me mentally when he didn't want me in his brain, so I knew every word. I was just drunk enough to think it was a good idea to belt along, and luckily everyone else was drunk enough to think it was funny instead of stupid.

"Don't you remember you told me you loved me babaaaaaay!" Seth flung his arms out and grabbed Nessie by the wrist. They started to swing in blurry circles.

"You said you'd be comin' back this way again, baybaaay! Baby, baby, baby, baby, oh, babaaay!" Nessie looked straight at me, firelight reflecting off her eyes and teeth and short brown hair, and crooned, "I looooove you, I really do!" I laughed and applauded and then everyone started singing. By the time we'd run through every Carpenters song Seth knew—really, why did he know so many?—Claire was cold and everyone else had to go rest up for patrols. The pack wolfed up and ran off to their respective homes. Claire was the only one other than me who'd bothered to drive to Nessie's house, so Nessie carried her back while I ran alongside. I tuned out the meaningless chatter of the other wolves and wished, for the millionth time, that I could change the channel on these guys sometimes.

Back at Nessie's house, I hauled the unused charcoal back to the garage. Her Phaeton was in there, gleaming and sexy.

"Hey," she hollered from the house, "I'm gonna grab a quick shower, kay?" Speaking of gleaming and sexy... No, I'd done great all week, acted natural and everything, no reason this night should break my streak.

"Uh huh," was all I could say. I wandered around to the front of the car and checked under the hood, but there was nothing to be done. Nessie kept her baby in good repair, and even if she didn't, I spent enough time in this car to be well on top of things. It was practically vintage by now, but the Germans built their cars to last and look good doing it. Even my Rabbit was still on the road.

I went inside and stepped on something damp and gritty. When I picked it up I saw that it was Nessie's bathing suit, some ancient green one-piece the psychic must have scrounged for her. It was still warm from her body. I dropped it like it was made of acid and snakes, and then headed into the living room. I flipped on the TV so I would have something to think about other than Nessie's warm, naked body showering mere yards away. I tried hard to engross myself in one of the nerd shows she found so interesting.

"If you're looking for porn," she said from right behind me, "try Adult On Demand, but you're probably better off on the laptop unless you like watching sixty cum-shots in a row." I jumped a little and turned, and promptly wished I hadn't.

Oh, god. She was wearing an old t-shirt of mine. A Metallica t-shirt, bless her heart. And nothing else that I could see, although there was no chance in hell I was going to drop my eyes from her face to check. The shirt was just long enough to cover the essentials, according to my peripheral vision. This wasn't the first time I'd seen her like this; she wore old t-shirts to bed all the time, had done so since childhood when she wanted to sleep in something that smelled like me while we were apart. But this was the first time I was seeing her like this since my incapacitating attraction started. Her hair was dripping, getting her shoulders all damp, sticking pieces of it to her face. She was flushed from the hot water and hell's bells, she wasn't wearing a bra again. Damn damn damn.

"I wasn't!" I said, wishing she would put on a robe or something. I didn't even know what I was answering. The speech center of my brain was completely out of touch.

"Hey, is this your shirt? How'd it get in my bathroom?" She picked at the hem and I saw an inch more thigh, and I began frantically looking for someplace to land my eyes that wouldn't give me a terrible hard-on. I settled on the remote control. This was ridiculous. I was acting like a teenager. I mean, I'd been having sex longer than I'd been not having sex. I was not afraid of women. I was not afraid of anything, really. But right now, I was terrified of this astonishing, damp female.

"I probably left it last time I showered here. That or you're a dirty sneaking thief."

Nessie laughed at this. "Relax. I don't care if you watch porn in my living room. I wasn't born yesterday. Everyone watches porn. I watch porn. I'm not going to call out the Inquisition."

"I wouldn't expect it."

"Hey, check it out," she said blithely, "You're not wearing a shirt and I'm not wearing pants. We're opposites! Ooh, no offense or anything, but those jeans look like they served in Korea." I glanced down at my pants. Okay, no visible erection. But the tension of keeping that fucker at bay was beginning to wear on me. Hearing Nessie talk about our respective states of undress was not helping, not at all.

"Sorry, sorry," she said, hands in the air, "I won't diss your crappy clothing anymore. I was only kidding." I couldn't tell what I'd done to put that defensive look on her face, but I wished I could undo it. Whatever it was. If she only knew how hard I was trying right now...but, of course, her knowing would defeat the purpose. I strove blindly for a change in topic and landed on the Biology Channel.

"Wanna watch this show on lichens?"

"Lichens? Lichens? Since when do you care about lichens?" Since you sat on the couch and I saw a little bit of your underwear, Nessie. In fact, lichens are too hot for me right now, let's move on to bread mold.

"Maybe if I found out more about them I would like them more," I said reasonably. "You should give them a shot, you know. They're not bad for...for whatever they are."

"They're epiphytes." Of course she knew that. I probably knew it too, somewhere in the one percent of my brain that wasn't being used up trying to keep my pants from tenting. She tossed me a can of something. It was cold, and I rested it as casually as I could on my crotch. It didn't really help, because Nessie was opening hers and tilting her head back to take a sip and a bead of water from her hair trickled beguilingly down her neck and vanished into her shirt. Just like in a beer commercial. Was I being punished for something? That had to be it.

"Well, I guess you don't need a documentary on it, then," I managed to spit out hoarsely. Oh, cock don't crow, I chanted in my head. Hen don't lay and hound don't bay...

"Here, put it on IFC, they're playing Shaun of the Dead." Zombies, yes, dear god, zombies were not sexy. A lifeline!

"Ooh, goodie!" I changed the channel with high hopes for a purely platonic evening. My hopes were dashed ten seconds later when Nessie stretched out and put her feet in my lap. Having any part of her in my lap was a challenge to my circulatory system, but as the night went on she sank further and further down into the couch cushions, and the shirt stayed where it was, and I could totally see her underwear if I just turned my head like, two inches...

I spent the whole movie staring straight ahead, carefully not touching her legs. Two hours later, I had nothing but shooting neck pains to show for it. I couldn't even remember the movie, which was extra pathetic since it was one I owned and had seen twenty times.

It was a relief when the ordeal was over. She passed in front of me to go use the crapper, and I screwed my eyes shut as she walked past so I wouldn't see anything that would torture me tonight. I couldn't block out the smell, though, the smell, how was it possible for one breath of it to dismantle every functioning part of my brain? God damned wolf senses. I flipped through the channels again and stopped on a meaningless commercial that was almost loud enough to drown out the voice in my head telling me to go after that mussed pink woman, hoist her up against the bathroom wall and fuck her till she screamed.

I sort of recognized the song, but not completely. I'd heard it before, in the car maybe, on the radio in the garage, it was an oldie but I liked it. I even knew a lot of the words but the titled evaded me.

"What's wrong?" Nessie asked from the doorway. What was wrong? Where to begin?

"I can't figure out what this song is. It's right there on the tip of my tongue, I just can't..."

"What is that, the Beatles?" she said. It sort of sounded like the Beatles, but I had all their albums and this wasn't on any of them.

"Not likely, although I guess if anyone can pay Paul McCartney's royalties Apple can. It's...it's...ugh, dammit all to hell!"

She scratched one ankle with the toes of her other foot. "Calm down, Jake, it's just a song, you can YouTube it or something—"

"It's just so frustrating," I exclaimed. "I really fucking hate when that happens, like, you think you know something, you know you know something, and you just can't get it. Like, I know this song, I've listened to it a hundred times, I know it, I just have to reach out and grab it and I can't remember. Augh. Fuck!"

"Hey, Jake, come on," She tried to reach for me but physical contact was out of the question until I could get my rogue libido under control, so I backed up a step in what I hoped was a subtle and casual move. It wasn't. Her eyes narrowed. "What the hell is your deal, Jacob?"

"Nothing. I just can't seem to get what I want." My mouth was totally disengaged from my brain now, or was it the other way around? "Not a problem you've ever had, so no need to worry about it."

I didn't even see it coming: Nessie smacked me upside the head so hard that if I'd been a normal human, she would have put me in a wheelchair for life. I felt my skin part and put my hand to my cheek. The fingers came away sticky and red.

That was a surprise. It cleared my brain a little, the way pain always did, and I could look at her for a moment without seeing the legs and tits and hair.

"Jesus, Nessie, you just gave me whiplash." She looked way more hurt about it than I felt. Remorse washed over me. Damn, she was really upset. I tried to do some damage control. "I'm sorry I said that. I'm just annoyed about the song. I'll probably remember it at five in the morning and shout it at my pillow." I tried to sound appeasing, but she was having none of it.

"Well, don't call me if you do. I don't feel like being yelled at by a pissy exhausted werewolf asshole." I felt my face fight a losing battle with my frustration, and finally just got myself out of there as fast as I could without another word. I let my anger and irritation carry me down to all fours, didn't bother trying to save my jeans. I couldn't handle being a human right now. I could not possibly have fucked up this evening any more.

_Whoa, Jake, what's up your butt?_

_Leah?_

Sometimes, if Leah was wolfed up at the same time I was, and if I wasn't vigilant, I bled thoughts over to her unintentionally. Of course she would be phased right now; she was running around the forest tonight because my whole pack was at that barbecue—

_Oh man, what happened at the barbecue? And can you at least try to stop spraying angst in every direction? It's getting on my nerves._

_Sorry. Fight with Nessie. Have to go drown myself._

_Stop being melodramatic. Everyone fights. What was it about?_

My total failure to keep my thoughts off her naked heaving body—_We were both tired and pissy, it was nothing._

_Well, since it was nothing, can you take over for me? I'm dead on my feet and you don't sound like you're going to be able to sleep any time soon. Joe takes over at sunrise, I'll tell him to meet you in the usual spot._

_Fine, whatever._

_Take it easy, loser._

_Yeah, see you._

I felt the little wrench as Leah unphased. Now there was no one in my head, thank god. I could just run around for the next hour and a half and stew over the shithole I'd just dug for myself. God help any leech who was in the area tonight, not that I expected any.

Nessie was pissed at me, and with good reason, but even through my guilt I couldn't stop thinking about how pretty she looked when she got mad. I had to stop this somehow. People would start to notice. Leah would definitely figure it out, although she would never rat me out because it would make waves for her pack, which included Nessie.

I had plenty to think about until sunrise. Then I ran back to Nessie's house, unphased, grabbed a spare pair of shorts from the backseat of the Rabbit, put it in neutral so the engine wouldn't wake her, and rolled it down the street before turning it on. When I got home I collapsed on the couch and passed into a blessedly dreamless sleep.

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For the next week I ran my wolves into the ground until even Leah started in on me. Nessie called me every day but I didn't answer. I hated the whole situation and I didn't know if I could keep things under control if I so much as spoke to her. I felt like a total cad. She probably thought I was mad at her, but I didn't want to try to apologize until I could figure out what to apologize for.

The problem wasn't her, it was my goddamn dick. I hadn't been this distracted since I was thirteen and discovered my dad's sock drawer full of girlie mags. This was way stronger than it had been with Maya or even Bella, more obsessive because I was depriving my body of something it was convinced it needed _now_ in order to go on living. But I just had to nut up and get on with my life.

Leah kept on my case but I couldn't face Nessie until I'd figured out how to put a lid on it. After a week away from her I started to despair of ever getting my shit together. I put myself on patrol all the time so I would be tired enough to sleep, but even sleep was filled with the unavoidable consequences of blue balls. I could have called up one of the many women with whom I'd had arrangements in the past and just banged one out, but the thought was unappealing because nobody turned me on these days but Nessie. I could have watched forty hours of top-shelf porn, visited a brothel, participated in a hundred-body orgy, and still the only way I would get it up was if I thought about her. Which I did. Constantly.

Jerking off only helped for about five minutes, but it was all I could do to control the situation. Before long my dick was as smooth as a slip-n-slide from all the Jergens I was going through.

By the end of a week I was almost sure I could handle face-to-face contact again, which was lucky because as soon as I got off the afternoon's patrol and went home she was in my house. She was lying on my couch with her mouth a little open, breathing slowly and loudly, about a decibel shy of snoring. Her scent was the first thing I noticed when I opened the door; the next thing I noticed was that she'd been looking through an old photo album. Reminiscing, probably, about a happier, simpler time when her best friend wasn't a total moron. Her head had fallen to the side; if she slept like that for long she'd wake up with a crick.

I went over and slid my arms under her, trying to ease her into a more comfortable position, but she clung to me the instant I touched her, her hands groping unconsciously until they found something to wrap around. Well, I could hardly just dump her back on the couch now, that would be heartless. So I turned and settled myself back into the cushions that were warm from her body and focused on how neatly we fit together, how ridiculous it would be to let a crush destroy this perfect simple moment.

My mind started drifting and it wasn't until I felt her shift, heard the soft smacking sounds of her mouth opening and closing, that I woke up. She was looking comfortably up at me through those expressive brown eyes, with every muscle in her face relaxed and the corners of her mouth turned up. How could I ever have hurt this woman?

"I'm sorry, pretty girl," I said softly.

"It's 'kay," she said sleepily. I rested my lips on the top of her head, breathed in the scent of her hair, and thought about lichens.

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**Well, that's all, folks! Just a short one. Hope you liked!**


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